


family of things

by wreckageofstars



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Compliant (??), Hurt and not much comfort because of who everyone is as a person, Someone Please Rescue My Children, Speculation, post 2x25
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 03:45:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15161858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckageofstars/pseuds/wreckageofstars
Summary: [There's nothing more to bind them together, he thinks, but the promise of eventual vengeance.]Yasha, Jester and Fjord are gone. The remaining members of the Mighty Nein take it - about how you'd expect.





	family of things

Morning dawns long and cold and crisp. They wake to find themselves cut in half.

The silver thread is undisturbed.

 

#

 

Once – a couple weeks ago, even – Caleb would have thought they'd been abandoned. He sees very clearly now that it is the first thing to occur to Beau, who gnashes her teeth together at the unmistakeable absence and clenches her jaw so tightly it makes his own teeth ache in sympathy. But he has been around these people now – around _his_ people, his friends, for all his misgivings, for all their dysfunction – for far too long and he knows they would never leave without saying goodbye. Even Yasha, who out of all of them is the most likely to simply slip away in the night. It's still a possibility, maybe, if only, but the thing is, though – the thing is.

“The night was clear,” he says in a rasp. It's the first thing any one of them has said, and his voice carries oddly, too blunt, too loud. Yasha comes and goes with the passing of storms. Everyone knows that. Out of the corner of his eye he watches Beau turn paler.

The silver thread is undisturbed. But beyond it –

Nott's nose is more sensitive than his. Molly's too, he thinks, as his horned silhouette stalks forward like a shadow, silent. Nott stays close to him, moans and presses her face into his knee. Molly confirms what Caleb knows she must be able to smell – the upturned dirt and the blood in the grass.

“Struggle,” is all he says upon his return, the rasp of his voice veering into Infernal, like the word – like any words – have had to escape the trap of his mouth.

Beau swears, a guttural hiss that's barely words, and stalks off behind the cart, fists clenched. To punch something, probably. Caleb says nothing. Only buries his hand in Nott's tangled, glossy hair and tries not to think too hard. His chest aches and they are all bruised and battered and Fjord and Jester and Yasha are – gone.

“I don't know who took them, but we are getting them back,” Molly promises in what is not quite a snarl, lips pulled back from his teeth, red eyes narrowed. He has never looked terrifying before. Now, he skirts the line. Fear makes some people sharp, Caleb notes, sunk so deeply into himself that the thought barely registers. Sharp and fast and angry. Not him. He is dulled by fear, smothered by it, drowning in it. Useless. The remains of his silver thread gleam in the sun, abandoned in the dirt. He should have protected them all better.

Nott slips her tiny hand into his and presses against his leg. He takes it gently and squeezes.

“We will,” he whispers, struggling out of the fog, not quite making it. The sky is clear, and the sun is shining, but the crisp air is ash on his tongue and it is far, far too quiet.

Molly's tail lashes, whipping furiously as he turns back towards the cart. The sun glints against the jewels on his hand, draped along his horns, and catches crimson in his eyes. Disconcertingly bright.

“Get Beau before she breaks her hand,” he orders, voice now oddly soft. Far from the ugly, choked-up rasp that has gripped him since he woke. Caleb doesn't even think to disagree. Someone ought to take charge – someone other than him. “We're going to follow that trail.”

 

#

 

It's not much of a trail, is the only thing. The dirt and the blood in the grass had lead to the road, but the road is covered in all kinds of tracks and markings. Beau finally snarls at them, voice gritty with unshed violence, face bloodless and tense, knuckles white against the reigns of her own horse, to just ' _pick a fucking direction, any direction, you_ – '

Any time lost standing around is time they can ill afford.

They go right, into the unknown. Down the road they were heading in the first place. Arbitrarily, but not really. The unknown stretches far and long, and none of them can stomach the thought of heading backwards. The indents in the dirt, the ones closest to the road, had veered ever so slightly in that direction. It could mean nothing – but it could mean everything.

The first few hours that they travel are in bright sunlight, the sky above them clear and blue and impossibly lovely, and he would hate it if he could, but he's sunk deeply into himself, battened the hatches and hunkered down. Nothing in, nothing out. Nott sits with him on his horse, even though there's more than enough horses for everyone, especially now –

She sits, and occasionally twists up to frown at him worriedly, squinting against the sunlight, tiny hands white-knuckled against the reins that she doesn't even really have to hold. He's – not quite there, but more there than not. There enough to guide a horse down a straight, well-cleared road. Guilt and fear have washed up his throat and clouded his useless _verdammt_ head, but that's nothing new and nothing odd. His chest aches where it was speared through, with a burning, unnatural sort of stiffness, but it hasn't bled since Jester – since Jester patched it up and he is reluctant to peel away her handiwork to check on it. A parting gift that he can't disturb.

They travel in silence. Following the trail through the beating of the cold, autumn sun against their backs and the taunting freshness of the air.

Around midday, Molly grinds them to a halt by the side of the road, face set grimly, and dismounts.

“I'm not going to sugar coat this,” he says, though his eyes and the set of his mouth say he'd very much like to. “There's no sign of them, or whoever took them. I think we have to consider the possibility that we've – ” He swallows. “That we've well and truly lost them.”

“No,” Beau says, low in her throat, hackles raised. _Warning_ , Caleb thinks blearily, exhausted, pained. “ _No_ , that's – ”

“I'm not throwing in my hat,” Molly snaps, hunched in on himself, mouth twisted. “I just think we have to be smart about this. They were taken. We've run out of trail to follow, if we even had any in the first place. We have no way of tracking them, and – we're on a deadline, my friends.” His eyes when they meet Caleb's own are troubled, even though his voice stays smooth. “I'm not exactly sure what our employer does with wayward employees, but he's got vials of our blood and frankly I'm not feeling especially keen to find out. Especially when it might get the other three in even greater trouble.”

Caleb can follow this thread easily enough. He grabs hold of it and drags himself out of his head.

“You think we should finish what we set out to do,” he says quietly, not liking it one bit, but admiring its simple pragmatism. “You think our employer can use that blood to find our friends.”

“If he can't, I'll eat my coat,” Molly says grimly. “But he's not the type to just hand out favours. He won't help us if we show up empty-handed.”

Beau has crossed her arms, jaw clenched, so tense she's practically vibrating.

“I hate to say it,” Nott pipes up wearily, still clutching the reins of their horse half-heartedly. “But I think Molly might be right.”

He wonders, half-dazed, if this is going to be the new normal. Molly, planning, the silver-tongued voice of reason. Nott, agreeing. Himself and Beau, two halves of a very odd, very new partnership. _Nein,_ he thinks, half a second after. It will never be normal. But it might be normal for now.

“Beauregard,” he says, as gently as he's able. He is not – especially good at this. “You know this is – this is likely our best option.”

“This,” she articulates clearly, furious with him, furious with the world, “is _horseshit_ and you know it.” Her chin quivers, but she doesn't break. “But I guess we don't really have a choice. Do we.”

He doesn't bother shaking his head.

“One condition,” she says. “We don't fucking waste our time. I mean it. We get where we're going, as fast as we can get there. We do the job, we get the fuck back, we rescue our friends.”

Molly's face is well-suited to many expressions, but sneering disdain is always one he manages particularly well.

“ _Obviously_ ,” he tells her, mounting his horse in a single, graceful leap. “I'm not sharing a room with you any longer than I absolutely have to.”

 

#

 

They have travelled hard and fast before; but never quite like this.

The first day, he chalks it up to their unforgiving pace, the lingering exhaustion from their battle with Tinkertop's fearsome – unexpectedly ranged – death machine. He's not the only one who is tired. Nott spends half the day slumped against him, reins limp in her hands, eyes squinted closed against the glare of the light, and Beau has bags carved out under her eyes, cavernous and dark, and if he feels a little bit like maybe he got run over by a cart or two, well. It is not the end of the world. It is not even particularly unexpected.

But their rest is as short as the day was long, and when he wakes his mind is coated in a terrifying fog, his throat glazed with bile, and the half-healed hole in his chest burns and burns and burns. His joints feel swollen and heavy, his tongue thick and useless, and as he struggles to his feet, shoves his lone blanket into his travelling sack, his knees almost buckle. The world is shimmering around the edges. Frumpkin winds around his feet, which does not help in the slightest.

“Are you alright?” Adorably suspicious, his Nott. Far too discerning. She'd slept at his side last night, just like always. “You look sort of – not right.”

“Well, I was recently impaled,” he tells her, which is not a lie. He doesn't like lying to Nott.

“That's true.”

“We've all been there.”

“That's – that's also true.”

“So,” he says. “Nothing to worry about. Will you ride with me again today?”

He is not a hero, or a masochist. If Jester were here, he would have gotten down on his knees and begged her to fix it already, but – but he is also no stranger to discomfort. No stranger to pain. There is very little any one of them can do about it, at the moment. It will clear up, or it won't. In the meantime, it makes very little sense to slow them all down, and so he stumbles to his horse and clambers up, reaching down so Nott can join him. Frumpkin settles across his shoulders, purring louder than usual. _Concerned_ , he catches a spectral whiff of.

“We are going very far today,” he tells her, grateful for her extra hands upon the reigns of the horse. “Will you be alright?”

“I want our friends back,” she says quietly. “I'll go as far as we need to, for as long as we need to.”

Once he would have been surprised, to hear that note of protectiveness in her voice for anyone but him. A flush of what he thinks must be pride grows in his chest. She is growing, learning, becoming. Something more than what she was, when she was already wonderful.

“They are very lucky to have you,” he mumbles into her hair, hunched over as surreptitiously as he can be. _And so am I_. “Lead on, my friend.”

They follow Molly at the head, Beau to their left, the cart trailing behind them. The canvas cover has made it heavier. Worse, it's made it much louder. It buffers and shakes with the wind, and he often finds he has to bite down on his tongue to keep from counting the rhythmic beats of its buffeting. It gets harder and harder as the day wears on, and as morning passes into noon he loses himself to the compulsion, sinking back into himself, turning grey with the sky. Muttering softly under his breath. There is little sun today, and a wind that blows sharp and cold and beats against the canvas three-hundred and forty-seven times before –

“Caleb,” Nott says, face pinched in that way she gets when she's had to say his name more than once, cautious in that awful way of hers, like he's something that might break. “Caleb, we've stopped.”

He's had to bite his tongue to stop the counting and he worries absently that if he lets go of it now all that will come out of his mouth will be more numbers. There is no way to communicate this concern telepathically, however.

"Shit,” Beau says, dismounting her own horse – Loaf is at the front, and so he thinks it must be Crapper – and jogging over, bent over with exhaustion. “Is he – is he having a – ”

He fully intends to say something glib and reassuring. Well, maybe not glib. That is not his forte, though he can sometimes make attempts. But his mouth and his brain are having a disagreement and he realizes with dull resignation that he has been shaking under his coat with unnatural chill for at least the past hour, even though his face and hands are warm and dry. Frumpkin yowls, plaintively, and his stomach turns, chest throbbing.

 _Hmm,_ he thinks. _Not good_. What he says, mildly, is: “ _Schei_ _ße_ _._ ” And slides inelegantly off the horse.

 

#

 

He doesn't quite wake after that, the world a fuzzy, messy blur of flame and smoke and impossible rain on his cheeks, passing glimpses of the sky dark and cloudy and hopeless. He dreams of being trapped in the house that he set ablaze, burning alive with his family, the way it should have been, and it would be a nightmare if it wasn't sometimes something he wanted so badly. He dreams other things, too; of being slowly strangled by his own silver thread, wound too many times around his throat; of Jester, Fjord, Yasha, burnt to a crisp at his feet; or worse – not dead at all, but blank eyed and merciless, Trent Ikithon's silhouette choreographing their every move, a long, menacing shadow behind them and in front of them. Once – of the dodecahedron and the endless sky he'd only caught the briefest glimpse of.

He counts, because sometimes it is the only thing he knows how to do.

There are other things, too. Flashes of consciousness that don't last and don't make a terrible amount of sense. Purple filling his field of vision, lavender oil up his nose as Molly pulls back his shirt and winces at whatever he finds. Nott's tiny, clawed fingers, wound in his jacket, placed gently on his face. They've dragged him into the cart, he notes foggily. Covered him in every blanket they have between them. At some point, an interlude of searing agony, and the sharp, unmistakeable smell of whatever liquor resides in Nott's never-ending flask fumes its way up his nose and trickles mercilessly into the hole in his side. She sings to him for a while after that, he thinks, in a terrible, scratchy voice, small and out of tune and very, very scared. And then, after a while there is a new noise that he doesn't recognize, a dull combination of splats and patters that go by too quickly to count, water colliding with canvas.

The rain is what finally wakes him, the cart bouncing and rolling underneath him and the seventeen blankets between him and the cart's wooden floor, but it's a tenuous thing, his newfound grasp on consciousness. They are moving still, is all he can think, and though he can't remember why, he's so grateful that tears spring to his cheeks, cool against his face.

“You gotta get it together, man,” Beau begs through gritted teeth, her fingers wound white-knuckled through his own, the only tether he has. The world is burning, somehow, always, but for some reason she is not. He can feel her other hand, cool and calloused and bony, clamped against his forehead, grasping his fringe, holding him against her. Her grasp tugs at his scalp with every pitch and whirl of the cart. The sharp whisper of her voice against the hissing spit of rain against canvas is desperate and awful and he does not know how to fix it. “Please,” she says, almost too quiet to hear. A prayer, maybe, but he doesn't know to who. “Please, please.”

But he doesn't know how to do anything but burn, for what feels like a very long time.

 

#

 

This time when he wakes the ground is no longer moving underneath him, but his face is being smothered by something cold and wet and rough, and his mind – always so full of holes, always so ready to trip backwards into the past – is thrown into a cloudy memory of the asylum, of being held down and bathed, of being choked by cold water and suds, scrubbed with rough towels until his skin ached and he was shivering with cold. His addled mind, then barely more than a collection of instincts, had always assumed it was a punishment, though for what, they never told him. He had decided – not then and not there, and maybe not even consciously, but after, when that single touch had cleared away the fog – that from then on it would always be his choice, on his terms, and if other people thought he was dirty and smelled bad, well, all the better for them really, they were only seeing the truth of what was inside him, and so he rarely chooses to be clean because he doesn't deserve it, he doesn't deserve it and he hasn't chosen it and he _doesn't want to be held down and half-drowned_ –

“You asshole,” Beau swears, but there's no heat behind it, “would you stop – stop moving, I'm trying to keep you from _cooking in your skin_.” The rumble of her voice breaks through the burning fog and the panic and the unbearable touch of damp cloth on his face, covering his eyes. He stills. She sighs. He feels her chin come to rest on the crown of his head and as he imagines her scowling, the frantic pounding of his heart starts to ease. “ _Shit._ Sorry. Poor choice of words.”

“It's alright.” Nott says what he's thinking, sounding to the left of him, a bit watery. Like he's listening deep underwater. “I don't think he's quite awake. He probably can't hear you.”

“Well, he can hear something. Thought he was gonna claw his fucking eyes out. Or mine.” The cloth shifts, tentatively. He can feel the tips of Beau's fingertips now, pressing it against his forehead. It's still a kind of sensory hell, cold and awful, rough against his eyes and smelling of damp cotton and mildew, and he doesn't quite understand why it's there, when he can't seem to stop shivering, when he can still hear rain pattering against the canvas roof overtop of them, but – but if Beau and Nott think it should be there, then probably it is not going to hurt him. Even if it was going to, he thinks, pragmatically, smelling ash that he thinks is probably not really there, he would probably let them. It's quite the balancing act, being a monster. He craves autonomy, agency, the – the sheer _ability_ to make his own decisions even as he understands that he is the last person that should be making them. Beau and Nott are his – friends. He trusts them to do what they think is right. Generally speaking, he thinks it is probably more right than what he thinks is right, even when he himself is convinced that he is, in fact, the rightest. In clearer moments, he can recognize all too well that arrogance and paranoia sometimes conspire to ruin him. In less clear moments – well.

That being said, he can't quite banish the visceral panic summoned by the smell and the feeling and everything still isn't quite making sense and he is _cold_ and he wants it _off his face, away from his nose, his eyes_ –

“Shit,” Beau swears again, her grasp a very careful kind of rough, holding him against her, pinning his arms to his sides. _Safety_ , he thinks, _she is doing this to keep you from hurting her, from hurting yourself_ , but the thought is not quite solid enough to get to where it needs to, gets swallowed by the fog before he can make sense of it. The cloth shifts, but it's not _gone_ and he strains against her hold, panic thundering in his ears, the past tearing at his ankles, chest aching. “Okay, alright,” she mutters, voice strained in kind as he struggles, “just – am I – am I doing something wrong here? I've never – I'm not good at taking care of people, man, maybe – ”

Something settles across his lap, weighted, warm, and he smells campfire smoke and lavender, colour flashing behind his eyes in recognition. Molly's tapestry, he has time to think blearily, stilling in surprise a moment before something else is dumped in his lap, warm and heavy and alive. Purring softly, anxiously. _Frumpkin_.

“I think,” Molly says, sounding close enough to touch. He _is_ close enough to touch, he can feel the heat of his breath on his cheek, under the rough dampness covering his eyes. “I think when you're as skittish as our Mister Caleb is, waking up restrained and with your eyes covered might not be the most comfortable experience.”

“ _Shit_ ,” Beau says, sounding genuinely chagrined. As the cloth is peeled back from his face, Molly's eyes gleam back at him in the dim light, clear and red. Searching for something. Coherence, probably, and in that case he is probably going to be fuck out of luck because right now the world is hot and cold and blurred around the edges and Caleb can barely remember his own fucking name let alone string a sentence together.

“We're stopped along the road,” Molly tells him, crouched down in front of him and Beau. There are lines of stress carved into his forehead, but his voice is smooth and reassuring. “We've been travelling for a day and a half that I think you likely don't remember very well. Beau is holding you – ”

“ – so that you don't _fucking_ claw your eyes out – ”

“ – because we figured she could take it if you elbowed her in the face. The damp cloth is there to keep you from burning alive – ”

“ _Mm_ ,” Beau interjects, strangely high-pitched, still dripping in chagrin that he doesn’t deserve.

“ – but I might let her take it off your forehead,” Molly talks right over her, though he spares a withering glance in her direction, over Caleb's head, “if you can convince me that your brain isn't still being slowly cooked inside your skull.”

Beau's chin is still resting on the crown of his head, and he can practically feel her face twist into a wince. That mental image, in tandem with Molly's incongruously unconcerned demeanour, his unaware foot in his unaware mouth, strikes him suddenly as unaccountably hilarious and before he can stop himself a horrifying, raspy laugh escapes him, mirthless and sharp.

Well. He's always enjoyed a good bit of irony, anyway.

“Right.” Molly nods, and in the gloom the expression on his face is difficult to make out. But his brow is creased, and everyone knows that Molly panics quietly. Caleb won't discredit him with the assumption that the cool face he puts forward is because he doesn't care, even though most days he still has trouble fathoming why anyone would ever bother. “That's not very reassuring, dear.” Frumpkin loafs in his lap, kneading his paws in Molly's tapestry, and Nott wiggles her way in under his arm as Beau loosens her grasp to accommodate.

“Caleb,” Nott says, voice a hair's breadth above a whisper, barely audible over the flat, dull sound of the rain above their heads. Her small, clawed hand winds in the fabric of his shirt. Worried, and he cannot stand it, and if he knew how to fix it, he would. But the laughing, he thinks. Sometimes there is a right moment to laugh and sometimes there is a wrong moment and he very often gets them confused, but Nott, oddly enough, always seems to be able to tell. She looks up at him with her luminescent eyes, gleaming yellow in sallow, dim light, searching, just like Molly's had been. _Wrong moment_ , he thinks, and maybe if he shuts up it will wipe away the worry on her face –

“To be fair,” he wheezes out, feeling wrung out and bruised, the place in his chest where the pole went in burning with the dregs of his laughter, “my brain was cooked in my head many years ago, and so I am not sure this judgement is very sporting.”

Beau exhales so forcefully he can feel her lungs deflate, where he is pressed against her chest. “Oh, thank _fuck_ ,” she all but spits, no tact, all blunt force, chin pressing into his head. Even her relief is something tangibly violent. Nott buries her face into his chest in relief and Molly sighs. Some undefinable tension in his face relaxes, but doesn't disappear.

“Well, that's something,” he says. “Less terrifying than a lot of the things you've been saying lately, Mister Caleb. How many fingers?” he asks, presenting three a couple centimetres from Caleb's nose.

“ _Drei_.”

His face turns solemn, sorrow catching the lines at his mouth. “And how many members?”

“ _Vier_ ,” he whispers, after a moment. “One tiefling. One monk. One goblin. And – ”

“One wizard with a fucking hole through his chest,” Beau finishes for him. Her grip has turned shaky, and her voice is tight with – something, he half-notices, but he can't figure out why.

“And Frumpkin,” Nott adds, voice muffled, her nose still pressed against his chest, avoiding carefully the side that had been impaled. Frumpkin chirps in acknowledgement.

“Alright,” Molly says. Gentle, smothered concern, like the glibness of his tone is fooling anyone. “You seem to be back to making about as much sense as usual.” His eyes flick to Beau. “Permission granted.”

“Fuck you, Molly,” Beau says, the phrase at this point serving more as a polite acknowledgement than anything else, her voice still oddly strangled, but the hand with the cloth lingers near his face. “He might be back to full sentences, but he's still – ” She pauses, presumably in search of a euphemism that isn't horrifyingly ironic, and he would be oddly touched but he can't help the flinch as the cloth draws nearer.

“You don't have to have it,” Nott says, her face still hidden in his shirt, voice muffled by the cloth. She shifts as he flinches, settling in more determinedly.

But Beau is indignant. “This is what you do for people when they're sick,” she insists. “And seeing as how we have almost exactly nothing else that's remotely helpful and all three of us are _super fucking useless_ – ”

Hmm. Rather early in the night, to have hit the nail so cleanly on the head, but the absences they've been dancing around are made starkly obvious once again. There are no softly glowing hands to make the pain melt away. No quiet, diplomatic interjections to brush away the tension. No strange, soft observations to serve as distraction. Just a hole where the heart and the heads of their strange little group had been. They are the stragglers. Nott and himself, Molly and Beau. Scrappy and rough and not especially good at getting along. Not especially good at healing, and not especially good at anything else, either.

But they are a vicious bunch, he thinks, chest burning with something deeper and more satisfying than lingering pain. Sharper around the edges than the rest. Desperate. It will serve them well, when they finally track down their wayward friends. It's that promise of eventual violence, he thinks fuzzily. The promise of retribution that is fuelling them. Without it, he's sure they'd fall apart.

“ _He doesn't have to have it_ ,” Nott hisses back protectively, turning her head up at Beau. Sandwiched between them both, he can feel them tense, but his words are slow to come right now, dried up and ashy in the back of his mouth, and truthfully – he doesn't want it. He catches a glimpse of one yellow eye, narrowed into a slit. She doesn't even understand his aversion to it. For her, the only thing that matters is that he doesn't like it.

To his surprise, it's Molly who intervenes, a purple hand made darker by the gloom raising in a manner that comes across distinctly disapproving. His sleeves are sopping wet. He must have been outside, setting up camp, before. “None of that,” he chides, plucking the cloth from Beau's hands. “I'll take this. Caleb, let us know if you start to see weird, feverish shit again and I'll put it back on you. _You_ , shove over.”

Caleb can't see Beau's face, but he can feel the stone-like glare that's likely settled over her. Molly's lips purse thinly.

“Do you want pocket bacon, or not?”

“ _I_ do,” Nott says, squirming under his arm until her head is less squished into his side. “Come on, Beau, shove over.”

She obliges, but not without grumbling, and all three of them shift to the side, making room on Beau's right for Molly to squeeze in. He takes a corner of the tapestried coat delicately and sets it over his legs. Distributes bacon from his pockets with a flourish and a flashy smile that doesn't meet his eyes.

“There. Dinner is served.” He looks back to Caleb searchingly. “What about you, Mister Caleb? Would you care for some?”

Truthfully, he barely cares for it on the best of nights, but – especially now – he can't honestly imagine anything he'd like _less_. The sentiment must make it to his face somehow, because Molly nods, forehead still surreptitiously pinched, even though his mouth is still smiling.

“Completely understandable. I'd offer you anything else, but I – I couldn't seem to get a fire started for us.” A brief flicker, in those eyes. Something sadder than sheepish. But it explains why he smells of damp and woodsmoke. The patter of rain above them would have made it a fairly fruitless endeavour.

“I can – I can give it a try,” Caleb offers, preparing to struggle against Beau's grasp once again, the world spinning as he shifts. They all have roles to play. More than usual, right now. He had been useless before, but in this, at least –

“ _No_ ,” the other three snap, not quite perfectly together, overlapping comically. A purple hand pats his knee. Beau tightens her grip.

“That's not what I meant. I think we're warm enough under cover here,” Molly says reasonably. “You're a remarkably efficient heat source, at the moment. In the morning, maybe. Nott can make you more of that tea.”

“Tea?”

“I had to use some of your licorice root,” Nott admits, a bit sheepishly. “And some herbs from my medicine kit. I think it helped you? Maybe?”

Well. He's no longer – what had Beau said, _cooking in his skin_ , funny, he knows exactly what that smells like, and so he thinks it probably did. He has a brief, unsettling flash of bitter liquid being poured down his throat, but can't figure out if the hazy recollection is from his childhood or from yesterday.

“That was very smart of you,” he says regardless, a tired smile making its way across his face when she beams at the praise. Every second he's awake banishes the taste of ash in the back of his mouth. Here and now is better than there and then, even when here and now is less than perfect. He has to try to remember that. “Thank you, Nott. And you, Beauregard.”

“Don't mention it,” Beau says roughly, still struggling with something she can't articulate, chin grinding against the top of his head with the movement of her mouth. “I mean, literally, don't mention it. This? This right here?” He assumes she's referring to the fact that the four of them – five, with Frumpkin included – are essentially snuggled together for warmth in the back of the cart, in closer quarters than they've ever been. Possibly to the fact that she's been all but cradling him in her lap for the better part of two days. “It never happened.”

“It never happened,” he agrees raspily, a frayed kind of warmth building in his chest. “It's not even happening right now.”

“Ahh,” Molly sighs, swinging an arm around Beau's shoulder with nonchalant concern and plunking his other hand across, down into Frumpkin's fur. “I'm so glad we all understand each other.” His fingers reach past Beau's shoulders to tousle Caleb's hair. “Are you feeling better, truly?”

Marginally, he thinks. Anything is better than being lost to the chaos of his own mind. He would rather be awake and aching and tired than unconscious and dreaming. Awake and aware of what they have lost.

Aware of what they still have, too, he supposes.

“Much better,” is what he says.

“Good,” Nott says, a bit fervently, her voice edged with exhaustion. She's turned her face back into his shirt, her pointy goblin nose poking into his side. It's a familiar sensation, welcome in the gloom, in the thick tension of early evening. “We were worried, you know.”

His hand finds her hair, and he rubs a thumb behind her ear reassuringly.

“You, ah. You don't have to worry about me.”

“Oh no,” Beau says. “No, we definitely do, you giant fucking asshole.”

“That's not very delicately put,” Molly interjects, horns tipped upward, looking away from the rest of them, up at the cart's canvas top. Like maybe he can see the stars beyond it. “But she does have a point,” he adds. “Next time you're feeling poorly, it might be better form to actually tell one of us, instead of – ”

“ – _falling off your fucking horse_ ,” Beau finishes for him, voice catching, seeming to have finally stumbled clumsily upon the source of whatever she's been trying to work through, “and scaring the living _shit_ out of everyone left and then almost fucking dying when there is literally no one here who could possibly fix it, you asshole.” She releases him briefly from her grasp to wipe a bony forearm across her face, breathing harshly. “Don't you think we've had our fair share of losses lately? And by lately,” she chokes out, as horrified as the rest of them are to find herself in tears, “I mean, like, literally within the past three days, and I just – ”

She takes in a furious, shuddering breath, hideously embarrassed.

“It would really suck,” she hisses out. “If you died. That's all. And Jester is gone, and Fjord is gone, and Yasha – ” Her voice catches again, like nails against glass, fragile and violent-sounding. “ – is also gone and I – ” She takes in another breath beside him, gasping, sharp, violent, “I miss that _stupid fucking bird_.”

The silence that follows is heavy, awkward. They are all terrible at this. Caleb struggles for a moment, words spinning in his throat. He never knows what to say, anymore. His head is full of holes, aching absences that stretch and bend, that steal away the parts of him that had once been full of clever things, quick things, kind things. He dumps Frumpkin into Beau's lap – _be cute_ , he orders, _blep it up_ – while he thinks, pressed against her, noting painfully every hitch and pull of her frantic breaths. His failsafe. His – friend. He guides the hand – calloused, rough, bandaged and bloody – supporting his chest to Frumpkin's neck fur and holds it there until her breaths even out.

“I'm sorry,” he whispers eventually, fingers of his other hand tangled in Nott's hair, pressing against her head reassuringly when she protests. There are some times, too – though not many – when he is right and Nott is wrong. Now is one of them, he thinks. Apologizing is the right thing to do, when you make your friends cry. He hadn't needed Yasha to teach him that. “I do not want to die either, I – I promise you. I am a coward, remember. I will be more careful.”

“Unfortunately,” Molly pipes up, his arm still snaked surreptitiously around Beau's shoulder, avoiding all their gazes, “I think you're braver than you think you are, Mister Caleb. Either that, or you have a death wish.”

“ _Nein, nein._ ” He is so rarely fervent, but something about this feels important. He's not going to leave them. Not on purpose. He needs them to understand that, understand it like Nott does. “I have things I need to do,” he says thinly, fire skating across his vision, desperate, aching want skirting the edges of his heart. “I am not finished here yet.”

“Well,” Beau says, her knuckles white in Frumpkin's fur, “sure seemed like you were almost fucking finished this afternoon, so just – pay a little more attention to yourself, okay? You don't deserve to suffer, you – _you_.” She shifts, shuffles the both of them deeper under Molly's tapestry, skirting around the truth that now only Molly isn't privy to. That might have to change, soon, even if the thought makes him want to burrow under the nearest tree and never come out, dive off of the nearest cliff, walk off into the night and –

No. He can't let himself think like that anymore. They deserve better than him, almost certainly, and he deserves far less than what they are, what they have become to him, but they are – a family of sorts. Barely, only just, but still. For whatever reason, under whatever star, they depend on each other. He can't leave them. He won't. Not until he has no other choice, not until his presence is an unmistakeable danger, not until his past finally, _finally_ , catches all the way up with him.

He is an unbearable person. A monster. Whatever good they see in him at all he cannot begin to imagine, but for better or for worse he is theirs. And they are his. His and Nott's.

They'll get them back – Jester, Yasha, Fjord. But, until then –

“We're all we've got right now,” Beau rasps, echoing his thoughts without knowing it, aching and tired, her voice yellow with exhaustion. “We have to – ” She sighs, resigned. “We gotta take care of each other.”

“Hear, hear,” Molly says. “And the fact that I'm agreeing with you should be enough to tell you how serious I am.”

“Fuck you, Molly.”

“Go fuck yourself, Beau.” Fondly.

Nott shifts, and her voice mumbles sleepily forth from the depths of his shirt. “We'll get them back, right?” she asks, sounding young, her edges made less sharp by exhaustion. “We'll get them back.”

“Damn right we will,” Beau says, cragged, rough, fragile. “Just gotta stay alive long enough to do it.” She nudges him with her elbow, but not hard enough to hurt, which is new. Her arms move behind him, and he hears the sound of her uncorking her wine skin with her teeth. She drinks, once. Passes it to Molly, who takes a careful swig of her inheritance, eyes gleaming in the dark. He hums appreciatively and passes it to Caleb.

Normally, he would hesitate to partake, but the whole affair has a heavy, ritual feel to it. He drinks, and the wine, far richer and expensive-tasting than any other he's ever had, slides down his throat, cool. He passes it to Nott, who takes an uncharacteristically small swig of it before returning it to Beau.

Less dramatic than a blood pact. But somehow, more fitting.

“We'll get them back,” Molly says quietly, echoing Nott, finally wrenching his gaze from the canvas ceiling and the endless black of the night above. He grins, sharp, unkind. Promising violence. “And whoever took them will _regret it._ ” His gaze returns to the canvas-covered sky. The rain hasn't let up. He's waiting for the crack of thunder, Caleb thinks, suddenly, guilt broiling up his throat. Waiting for a storm that won't come. “Until then,” Molly says, fear buried under layers and layers of earthen dirt and bruised, rickety charm. “Beau's right. All we have to do is stay alive. Stay together.”

“And pretend this never happened. Like, collectively.” Beau settles against the back of the cart with a yawn and the creak of wood. Caleb leans back with her, still half-propped against her chest, on the verge of getting a faceful of her armpit. He feels strung-out, exhausted, half-burning, still, but – but it is comfortable, under the canvas, the weight of Molly's colourful coat, Nott tucked into his side the way it should be. “If anyone asks – I slept on the dirt. Alone. Like a bad-ass.”

“Don't worry, dear,” Molly says, eyes glued above him, arm tucked around Beau protectively, though they'll both deny it in the morning. “I'll take first watch, and I'll tell everyone I know that you slept on the ground.”

“We are everyone you know,” Nott points out sleepily.

“Everyone you _know_ that you know.”

“ _Caleb_.”

“Sorry.”

“Y'know,” Beau says, exhaustion beginning to blur the edges of her words. She sounds half-asleep already. “You're not so bad. Molly. The rest of you, too. We're all – we're all not so bad.”

Not so bad. It'll do, until they can be made whole again.

“I like that,” Molly mumbles absently. “Not so bad. Leaves a bit of wiggle room.”

“Ambiguity,” Nott agrees. “I like it, too.”

There's a pause.

“Gods, we're fucked,” Beau says softly, slurred with sleep.

“Yep.”

“Mm.”

“Not for long,” Caleb says quietly. “Not forever.”

“Why, Mister Caleb.” Molly's voice is low, but it carries well in the darkness. Gently amused. Night is truly upon them now. The rain hasn't stopped once, but it will have to eventually. “We'll make an optimist out of you yet.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy, it is like, 4 in the morning here because of who I am as a person, so please do let me know if you catch any repeated words or silly stuff like that. Beyond that, thank you so much for reading! This is my first time dipping my toe into Critical Role (first time writing anything but Star Wars, actually), and to be honest I've never had such a hard time finding character's voices in my life - something about the style of the media I always thought made this kind of transformative work difficult. But episode 25, like, actually ruined me and so I rolled up my sleeves and dove in and...here we are. Sort of run-on-sentencey and disjointed, but that's how Caleb...talks. So? Hope you enjoyed and I'd love to know what you thought!
> 
> PS - title comes from one of my favourite poems, Mary Oliver's 'wild geese'
> 
> PSS - (if you'd like to yell with me some more about these Garbage Children you can find me on tumblr @sunshinedaysforever)


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